Brexit latest: EU leaders go for beers and UK Brexiteers go bananas

Written by Dods staff on 18 October 2018 in Diary

Diary

Certain Tory MPs are very upset with Theresa May. Again.

What’s an extra 12 months among friends? That’s the message Theresa May will try to sell to her fractious backbenchers after conceding that the post-Brexit transition period will need to be extended until the end of 2021 to give more time to solve the seemingly intractable Irish border conundrum.

Predictably, Tory Brexiteers are appalled at the suggestion, which would see the UK tied to EU rules until five-and-a-half years after the referendum.

On the Peston show, hardcore Brexiteer Andrea Jenkyns said the idea was “ridiculous”.

On Twitter, her pal Nadine Dorries was raging that “we can mysteriously find billions to bung to the EU for the unnecessary extra year Clegg and Blair asked Barnier for to waylay Brexit”.

And Richard Tice, co-chair of the Leave Means Leave campaign was even angrier than usual. The extreme Leaver reckoned that "any transition period gives the EU zero incentive to negotiate anything" and he called May's latest thinking “downright dangerous”.

On the Today programme, Cabinet Office minister David Lidington tried to explain that the idea of extending the transition period another year was an idea worth discussing with the EU as a way of “getting over the difficult final hurdles”.

Meanwhile after dinner at the EU summit on Wednesday, Angela Merkel and Emmanuel Macron were spotted having a beer with Belgian PM Charles Michel and Luxembourg’s PM Xavier Bettel at a bar on Brussels’ Grand Place….